Flagship, poor dead Flagship, made a game called Hellgate. It wasn’t great, and not enough people bought it to save them from destruction. Now, however, the techno-fantasy action RPG is back, and will be relaunched in North America as a free-to-play title. No game can rest! All must live again under the banner of the undead F2P army! There’s a website for the relaunch here, telling us that there will be a beta in June.

Wow, this guy is the RPS equivalent of the nutters on youtube who think they are making a “funny political point” in the comments threads. He’s quite good at it actually, he’s even got the hilarious nicknames cliché going on.

Okay FLBR, would you rather they sale maps and completely split up the community?

I seriously do not understand your whining?

I hope cosmetic DLC is the future DLC for multiplayer games. I really wish devs would do away with charging for maps.

Advantages of cosmetic DLC:
It doesn’t split up communities like maps do.
It doesn’t give any player an advantage over another player.
It doesn’t effect the gameplay.
It’s completely optional. No gameplay downsides to not purchasing.
And last but definitely not least. It allows developers to release free game content funded from the cosmetic DLC. Tripwire has been doing this with Killing Floor and it’s been great. The games been updated a ton for free.

1) It’s the only FPS (so far) to have a Pet Class. There are other classes in the game, but the sorcerer is just so dang fun to play.

2) It’s the only FPS to have procedurally generated levels. They’re vanilla Diablo tile-style levels structurally, but that’s a huge step in the right direction that pretty much every other FPS developer has mysteriously ignored.

3) It’s the only RPG to be a full proper Action RPG as well as an FPS, unlike Bioshock which skimped on the RPG part. (I do like Bioshock 1 and 2, but I do understand why System Shock fans tend to hate them so.)

Yes, it was quirky, buggy, and had a weird off-putting subscription and online side which I never got involved in. Yes, the world itself was horribly shizophrenic, with the opening cutscene having a completely different tone to the dialogue which had a completely different tone than many of the missions and the ending was batshit crazy (not in a good way). But a good chuck of the gameplay experience was really good post-patch.

I am choosing to ignore the fact that the above video looks like a cross between WoW and Diablo and am choosing to remember the game my way, hoping that they keep the bits I liked and improve/toss the parts that were mediocre or batshit insane. (The game always supported multiple POVs, I just prefer First Person.) But either way, I still have a copy of the original disc and the final patch, so I can still install and enjoy the original single-player game either way.

People sold me on trying it as an action-RPG, so I was rather put out when I discovered upon playing it that it’s strictly a FPS with a bit more story than most and in no way resembling a RPGs mechanics. Perhaps if I had gone into it with an open attitude, or knowing what to expect, I might’ve liked it more, but as it turned out it was just sheer disappointment and I gave up.

Much the same how Dragon Age Origins was sold by EA’s marketing department explicitly as a “heavy action” RPG, but it’s really just an old style CRPG without multiplayer. Soured me yet again on the issue.

And all those good points can be rebuked by saying that the gunplay was more than a bit shit. Everything had the bullet spray and impact of a garden hose, enemies would just run straight at you and despite the number of weapons there were remarkably few strategies available. For me it was some good ideas (procedurally generated levels, semi permanent online) let down by awful execution.

Bhazor, I take it you never used a properly modified weapon with high quality upgrades.
The gunplay was what was needed from this kind of game, basic weapons were moderately useful, but it was all about the shiny loot and the stupid modifications that turned your character into an overpowered killing machine.
This kind of game thrives on the ability to make players feel like they’ve got the single best character that can drop hundreds of mobs in seconds. Case in point: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCwnREg5loY

Egg-zactly, one of the few games on the shelf for which we have two copies, one each. The pre-launch build up had a fantastic feel which shows that (a) I’m a sucker for hype and an ad-man’s dream consumer and (b) the core concept was solid.

Needed a few more months to sort the writing out before release, and get that first patch in (which really did sort a lot out) and if they’d never messed around with the we’re charging, we’re not charging, we’re kinda charging payment model – if they’d have gone this route from the start I wouldn’t be suprised if it would be still with us today.

Oh goody, I’m glad I’m not the only one who thinks that the payment model was the primary reason for HGL’s failure. They were treating paying customers like second-class citizens, unless they paid more. Awful idea.

I was a tester from relatively early on (ah, GMail memories: “Welcome to the Hellgate: London Friends and Family Alpha / Congratulations! You’ve been selected to be part of the very first group to help test Hellgate: London, the highly-anticipated Action-RPG from Flagship Studios!“), and I rather enjoyed the game, though it remained quite unfinished in a few respects even at the end of beta. But the basic mechanics were solid: blowing up stuff was great fun once you got a powerful gun.

But I never got around to buying the final product, waiting for a couple big patches and hopefully a reassessment of the subscription idea. And then Flagship went bust. Sad.

Hey, keep stalking me between sites and making taking random shots at me for years on end. After nearly four years, it doesn’t look crazy, creepy or obsessive at all!

Also, I only ever got the regular version of the game (at a discount), never subscribed, told people specifically NOT to get the lifetime deal. People spent more on angry red ‘THIS FUCKER LIKED HELLGATE, BURN THE WITCH’ titles for me on Something Awful than I spent on the game.

Got a couple of weeks solid fun out of it. Didn’t bother replaying on the higher difficulties. Liked what I saw of the stuff they added in the big patch just before shutdown. It had potential, and I liked it more than most of the lazy diablo clones (Loki, anyone?) at the time.

Be interesting to see if all these originally-went-bust-and-then-bought-out-by-someone-else-action-MMOs can make it. Hellgate and APB are the big, obvious ones, but Black Prophecy went through a kind of similar experience of being developed for subsciption, bought out when the original company went bust and relaunched as F2P. (although the original collapse was nothing to do with BP and the same developer has been working on it continually.

I’d like to see Tabula Rasa given another shot, too. That game was so badly rushed – they only added mechs (supposed to be a launch-day feature!) in the patch that went live about a week before it shut down.

Auto Assault, too. I remember that being fun in a very mindless sorta way. Completely levelling an enemy base, and leaving not a single building standing in a minute-long rampage was good fun.

I haven’t played the first one, but I played through three Evil Dead games with my room mate, on the PS2, and had a great time. They probably weren’t great games, but passing the controller back and forth and cracking up on Bruce Campbell’s lines was a lot of fun. The fact that there was always beer involved probably helped, too.

15% of it is:
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Yeah, considering what I remember of the game looks nothing like that, I’m choosing to think that footage is very much work in progress.

There were multiple POVs in the original game, and while I don’t remember a WoW-like option specifically, it looks like they’re going for the MMO crowd in that video. I played it as a single-player FPS/RPG hybrid myself, and had a great time. I might have been put off by that video, but I am assuming they’re keeping the first person / non cluttered HUD option as well as what the video shows.

Why would anyone want to play this?
Hellgate was terribad even back when it was originally released.
Just because something is microtransaction based doesnt mean you have to swallow it like the turd it is.

I’m always impressed by how frequently I disagree with the majority’s assessment. Just as I loved the subway mazes in Fallout 3, (really evoked Zork, for me) I loved the subway mazes and numerically based combat in this game as well.

If they can improve on it in any way, and it’s free? I’m very enthused. I have never enjoyed the story-based RPGs that so many pc gamers seem to value; to me, a game needs a variety of motor-based skills to learn, visual presentation (Doom2 in 320×200 still looks better to me than Crysis), exploration, complex sandboxing, and using my own imagination are all that matter. I want to be the main character. I don’t want the main character talking or making decisions. That’s what I’m for. That’s why I play games instead of watching television.

You are not alone. While I never did play multi-player I did play the hell out of single player and I thought the shooter mechanics were great, loot variety was excellent and the enemies were varied and creative. At times it felt like Doom 2++.

Then again I did play it before reading all the negative internet hype telling me I needed to hate the game.

I’ve not played Hellgate before, but I did thoroughly enjoy the subways of Fallout 3. It had such a labyrinthine feel to them, a post-modern dungeon fully realized. It was the dark, scary magical woods of Mirkwood in a psuedo-futuristic real world setting; a quick way to reach your destination, but a dangerous one.

From what I recall of playing this co-op with friends was that when we tried to play the game properly it wasn’t enjoyable (not sure if due to bugs or just generally being rubbish) but when we pissed about finding and exploiting glitches it was great fun (in hindsight I’m not entirely sure why). Going up levels by glitching through the ceilings rather than taking the stairs was a particular favourite.

The expression “throwing good money after bad” comes to mind. Hanbitsoft was a big investor in Flagship and the Korean distributor of Hellgate. When the game did poorly and Flagship went down, Hanbit was so devastated that only being bought up by T3 saved them. Having already invested so much money in Hellgate and Mythos, they decided to keep spending to get the U.S. rights, the source code (some of it, anyways), a small U.S. development team to keep working on the game, etc. They’re still weren’t doing well financially, so they laid off the U.S. development and publishing teams, and continued development of Hellgate in Korea (where it has only a small player base by this point). They’re not putting money into Hellgate because they believe in it, or think it has a future, but because they’re desperate to recover some of the huge amount of money they’d already spent on it.
Unfortunately, I doubt they’ll recover the money they spent after the collapse of Flagship, much less any of their original investment.

I was one of those idiots who bought the Founder’s package for Hellgate when it came out. Whenever I start feeling smart about something in life, I just need to remember that to knock me back down a peg.

Me I am one of the people happy for not having money at time it was available for I was gonna get it, kind of suspicious of lifetime subscription since then.

But happy to see the game come back, now come back in a good state, too bad the directx 10 is gone (now that I got a computer that could handle it), but cannot blame them an Asia dev for not using it considering most of their market tend more to go with economic build (actually underclocked [yes I did say underclocked not overclocked] build is common solution used has to save on electricity)

It’s not a huge shame the DirectX 10 bits are gone, because your computer probably still couldn’t run it. That shit is just horribly optimized, and it’s obvious they never really intended it to be workable with a couple new generations of graphics cards.

As far as I know there aren’t any U.S. servers (it’s all being run out of Asia), so I’m not sure why they wouldn’t make it accessible to Europe, too. (Except for the reason that the companies involved are completely disorganized.) Of course, it’ll probably run like crap, being located in Asia, but…

Oh and there’s no chance of a LAN mode, as it’s been turned into a “free to play” MMO paid for by “premium shop” micro-transactions. I guess that’s why it’s not showing up in Europe yet – Hanbitsoft’s UK office shut down a few years ago, so they don’t have anyone to set up the RMT stuff there. They’ll probably end up doing what they did with Mythos, which is find a European company willing to license it. So all they have to do is find someone crazy enough to be willing to license a game that probably won’t make any money.

So, yeah. I’m one of those mad souls that actually enjoyed the game. It was buggy and unpolished and the business model was disasterous (it should have been F2P from the start), and they released it early because they simply ran out of cash.

Unlike APB, however, which suffered a similar fate, the core gameplay of Hellgate was pretty solid. It just needed a lot more polish. They started to add the required spit-shine about a week or two before the game went down for good. An enormous 1-2gb patch (it was huge, whatever it was) that was supposed to be the grand hope for the games recovery. Too late, and it sank.

So yeah, it’s coming back and I really hope they do integrate that jumbo final patch into the mix.

Did they include the big patch that Flagship were working on at the end – well, yes and no. It turns out that the stuff Flagship had been working on wasn’t as complete as they said it was, and many of the features/improvements they were adding didn’t actually work yet (and were pretty far from working). The teams that ended up working on Hellgate, post-Flagship, had fewer resources and tighter patch release deadlines, so they incorporated some of the improvements that were part of the mythical Flagship patch, but some of the bigger changes never made it in.

Edit: Not to mention that the Korean owners have spent the last several years trying to make the game fit into a mould they were familiar with – the Korean F2P MMO model. So the game has changed in various ways to fit that formula.

I, too, enjoyed the single-player experience. At least until Borderlands came around. And then I went back to it and enjoyed it a little more, just not as much.

With some tweaks to improve pacing, UI awkwardness, and some of the don’t-give-a-fuckery that got into several of the quests (seriously, collect “Things” from Zombies?), the game could be almost great. From the looks of that video, those tweaks are not forthcoming.

The funny thing about that comic is that when the game actually came out, the stuff they offered ‘elite’ players was so insultingly weak that the only people to pay for more than a month (I didn’t even go that far) were the ones with the ill-advised lifetime subscriptions.

I think only Elite players could play Hardcore more (same as Normal mode, but it locks your character when you die). That was the only notable think they got, far as I remember.

I played through it co-op with a couple of friends, we liked it, it was good, mindless fun.

At the start we were saying that we’d play through a second time, switching roles/classes (I was an engineer of some sort I think) but we didn’t bother, we did finish it though and finished wondering why anyone would pay for the premium content.

Hellgate! The time we spent together when you were in Beta, and the world was bright and hopeful. Is your melee combat still dangerously underpowered compared to ranged? Are the grappling guns still useless?

This game had the potential for greatness, but they were tied for an unrealistic launch date. We all told them, YOU NEED MORE POLISH TIME! We cried on the forums. YOU CAN’T NOT DELAY!

Release, TANK.

Perhaps the true deathknell for the game was when they replaced all the hilarious wierd beta dialogue, like the shopkeeper that would hit on you and the scout that would complain of his genitals being burned off, with samesame serious boring snooze stuff.

At least they kept the crazy old man and long tormented Techsmith #18.

I’d be more interested if I learned I could redeem my box code for F2P store points.

Also, if they did a massive re-balance. One of the main things that bothered me about Hellgate is advancing levels would result in tiny shifts of power, like sinking your hard-earned skill tree point in something that granted a mere 1% damage boost. Such an advancement mechanic has all the achiever-driven appeal of watching paint dry.

I’m curious what this will mean when it’s free to play: I own the original box, wouldn’t mind grabbing this if its either truly free or if I can redeem my CD key to get at least the original content, but if they expect me to pay for this game twice after all that, they can eat poo by the bucket.

I really enjoyed Hellgate. I wish Blizzard would feature a third person camera for Diablo III. With today’s modern graphics, a tactics-less action RPG shouldn’t have to suffer from an isometric perspective.

too much wowquest-killcollecting, powerplay-centric and selfishly anti-social. It’s a heap of WoW rots. Not for me.
The mere fact that chars have the hateful exclamation marks shows how useless is interacting with the gameworld, story and everyone in it, and meta-gaming is all there is.